Hillbilly Elegy
Director: Ron Howard Run Time: 116 min. Rating: R
Starring: Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Haley Bennett
“Sometimes raw, sometimes funny, unflinchingly honest, richly human, and ultimately deeply moving”
– Pete Hammond, Deadline
About the film:
From Academy Award winning director Ron Howard based on the 2016 bestselling memoir by Ohio-born author J.D. Vance about growing up in Appalachia.
An urgent phone call pulls a Yale Law student back to his Ohio hometown where his mother is living with addiction. He reflects on three generations of family history and his own future.
About the filmmakers:
Ron Howard is a multi-award winning actor, writer, director, and producer whose work in film and television spans genres and decades. His critically acclaimed portfolio includes dramas Apollo 13 (1995), A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Frost/Nixon (2008), as well as the Grammy Award-winning 2016 documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week (2016).
Howard spoke with PBS NewsHour on the joy of being a storyteller and with Netflix on his aspirations for the controversial Hillbilly Elegy.
From Middletown, Ohio, author and executive producer J.D. Vance served as a Marine in Iraq and then graduated from The Ohio State University. During his first year at Yale Law School, he wrote “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis.” The film was partially shot in Middletown.
Adapted screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, writer of Hope Springs (2012) and Divergent (2014), and co-writer of Best Picture winner The Shape of Water (2017).
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